the athenians who tried socrates for impiety in 399 bce and foundhim guilty were heirs to a set of demo cratic practices that had been in ex-istence for a little over a century. The breakthrough to what we would rec-ognize today as a demo cratic form of government had come around theyear 507, when an Athenian aristocrat named Cleisthenes suddenly emergedas a leader and guided the Athenians through a series of reforms. But Cleis-thenes was not the first demo cratic reformer; he was building upon foun-dations laid by generations of Greeks before him.

As is the case with most figures in Greek history, especially Greek his-tory before the wars with Persia in the first half of the fifth century, wecan know very little about Cleisthenes as an individual, just as we knowlittle about how he persuaded the Athenians to implement the changes heproposed. The limited knowledge we do have about Cleisthenes stems fromwhat is probably best considered an oral tradition of Athenian history thatencompasses both fact and fiction. It was fifth- century Greek historianssuch as Hecataeus and Herodotus who first recorded the oral traditionsabout the more distant Athenian past; the historical genre was further de-veloped by Thucydides, who mainly reported contemporary events butsometimes paused to digress about well- known stories from the past thatilluminated the present. The main story connected to Cleisthenes pre-served in Thucydides and Herodotus concerns his lineage, an aristocratic

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CleisthenesThe Family Curse behind Athenian Democracy

family that had long been accursed. Cleisthenes and his family— the Alcmaeonidae— lived under a shadow of suspicion because of an act ofimpiety committed by a distant ancestor. The tradition related how, at apivotal moment in the history of Athens, two opposing po liti cal groupscame face to face at a shrine sacred to the city’s gods. In the ensuing clash,members of one faction killed some men who had taken refuge at a publicaltar. The egregious act of impiety had serious po liti cal repercussions, andit resulted in what came to be known as the “curse of the Alcmaeonidae”(Herodotus 5.70–72; Thucydides 1.126).

The details of this episode as reported by Herodotus and Thucydidesmay not be entirely trustworthy, and we will never know for certain whatexactly happened in the middle of the seventh century, the traditional datefor when the curse was initially called down. But the larger story behind thiscurse and the way the curse reportedly came about does reveal a good dealabout the world the Greeks inhabited, and their assumptions about thisworld. An analysis of these assumptions can then uncover the very humanhopes and fears of the Athenians who over time fashioned what later gen-erations would come to know as democracy. This chapter provides a firstglimpse into that ancient world.

the lay of the land

The Athens that we are familiar with today is the sprawling, sunny Mediter-ranean metropolis near the Aegean. It spreads itself out below the remainsof temples perched high atop the Acropolis. The city recently remade itselfinto a cosmopolitan international destination as it prepared for the twenty- eighth modern Olympic games in 2004. But this modern urban center hasa continuous history of human settlement that stretches back without breakfor at least 3,500 years, as construction projects for the new undergroundsubway revealed. The period that brought democracy to the world occurredmore than 2,500 years ago, in the fifth century. The emergence of democ-racy in Athens was not an inevitable outcome but rather the result of count-less decisions made over many generations— the responses of real people toreal and pressing situations. The all- too- human impulses of fear and some-times greed motivated them to make the decisions they did, as did the wishto enjoy life in the present while ensuring that their families and descendantswould thrive in generations yet to come.

But in the changeable environment of the ancient Mediterranean itwas not easy to establish a stable government. A traveler to Athens and

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its neighbors in the fifth century would have seen a landscape dominatedby mountains, islands, and the sea, looking much as it does today. Iso-lated harbors and valleys sheltered small villages and encouraged the de-velopment of localized dialects and customs. Mountains made regulartravel over land difficult, or at least inefficient and time- consuming, whilethe jagged coastline of islands, gulfs, and harbors offered safe anchoragefor ships that regularly sailed the surrounding waters. The Athenians,like many other Greek- speaking peoples, relied on the sea for their liveli-hood. As much as the po liti cal and social circumstances changed duringthe course of the fifth century, the connection to the sea remained essen-tial for Athenians.

Patterns of settlement and land use on the mainland and the islands ofGreece were dictated by the landscape and its relationship to climate.Mainland Greece and the islands received little rainfall, and Attica, thename for the countryside surrounding the city of Athens, was among thedriest areas, with as little annual rain as falls in some of the drier regions ofthe U.S. desert Southwest. The prevailing Mediterranean wind came in fromthe west, and Attica, being on the east side of a mountain range, receivedeven less rainfall than some of its immediate neighbors. The arable land inthe plains of Attica stretched between the mountains and the sea, and it washighly valued for the cultivation of grains— primarily barley, but wheatand rye were also grown. Wheat was the preferred cereal because it was afiner grain when milled, but barley was the preferred crop because it wasmore drought tolerant. When the rains did arrive, they came in Novemberor December and fell until early March. During these wet winter monthsfarmers planted and cultivated the grain crops, and sailors stayed off thestormy seas. During the long, windy, and dry summers the sailors, traders,and itinerant craftsmen turned to their ships, while farmers tended theirprincipal warm weather crops: figs, olives, and grapes.

Because the availability of good, arable land was so limited, the plains were not used for pasture. Consequently, there were precious few herds ofcattle, an important fact with implications for both diet and religious lifethat will be discussed in more detail in chapter 2. Only the richest aristo-crats kept and bred horses. Sheep and goats were much more common,and these herds were pastured above the plains in the uplands, and evenfurther up in the mountains during the warm summer months. Herd ani-mals were bred and maintained primarily for the goods they produced year- round—wool and milk— and only secondarily for their meat. Thedemands of animal sacrifice were stipulated in the traditional civic calen-

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dar of religious festivals, and they were based on the implicit recognitionthat resources were scarce.

The deities in the polytheistic system of the ancient Greeks ranged fromthe most powerful and widely recognized gods to lesser known, local spir-its. The gods and goddesses of ancient Greece mirrored both the naturalenvironment that the people relied on to make their living and the socialworld that governed the daily lives of real men and women. Some weregods whose power over the natural world lay in those agricultural resourcesthat the Greek diet so heavily depended on— for example, Demeter, thegoddess of cereal crops; Athena, who oversaw the cultivation of the olive;and Dionysus, the god of the vine and the production of wine. There werealso lesser deities like Pan, who oversaw the work of shepherds, and the in-numerable nymphs who imbued the springs that streamed from the hillsand snowy mountaintops.

While the gods that the Greeks worshipped can reveal to us the re-sources that they valued, at the same time we can today discern a gooddeal about human social relations in ancient Greece by analyzing the inter-actions among these gods. A whole panoply of deities was arranged into anelaborate and interconnected family headed by the supreme patriarch Zeus,“father of gods and men” as he was called by the traditional poets Homerand Hesiod. Zeus the divine patriarch had authority over all the immortals(with the notable exception of three ancient goddesses called the Fates)and over all the earthly mortals. Zeus ruled the other deities not becausehe was the oldest, or the wisest, and not because he had a special connec-tion to the land and the natural environment of Greece. Zeus ruled becausehe had successfully wrenched power from his father, Cronus. Cronus hadonce done the very same thing when he became ruler over his father, Uranus.This mythic pattern of an intergenerational power struggle between maledeities and their fathers occurs in neighboring eastern Mediterranean cul-tures; contemporary scholars call it the Succession Myth. As heir to theSuccession Myth, which required the son to dethrone his father (often withthe duplicitous assistance of his mother), Zeus modeled a pattern of behav-ior that was unconsciously and consciously imitated by generations of Greekmen. Certainly mortals did not kill their fathers (or even wish to), but inthe natural order of things the son grows up and takes the father’s place inthe world and thus symbolically defeats him.

This mythic social order that Zeus modeled placed power in the handsof a few who needed the obedience and labor of many others to maintainthe status quo and keep the world from returning to a primeval state of

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chaos. Viewed within the economies of archaic and classical Athens, thepattern manifested itself in the small fraction of men— those of a heredi-tary, aristocratic class— who governed everybody else. The category “every-body else” embraced many different subcategories, including less well- to- do ordinary citizens, some of whom were small landholders and in de pen dentfarmers, while others worked as sharecroppers in a semifeudal system, cul-tivating land belonging to a wealthier class. The most unfortunate becamedebt bondsmen, who lost their liberty and citizen privileges until theycould repay their debt. “Everybody else” also meant noncitizen but freeresident aliens called metics, many of whom were specialized and profes-sional craftsmen who worked in Athens or its port. Finally, all the slaves,regardless of where they labored, all the women, and all children countedas “everybody else,” too. There were far more people in this category of“everybody else” than there were actual citizens. At best only 25 percent ofthe total population of classical Athens were citizens with full po liti calprivileges.

Because running farms was labor- intensive, many people lived in thecountryside villages of Attica; but by the end of the sixth century, Athenswas a small urban center that existed in a mutually dependent and benefi-cial relationship with the outlying rural districts, called demes. Athens wasthe recognized name for the larger autonomous civic entity called the polis(city- state), and it was a large town that contained the seat of centralizedgovernment for that polis. The surrounding countryside of Attica encom-passed hills and mountains as well as the broad plains with their scattereddistricts, villages, and towns extending from the Aegean Sea in the southand east to the mountains in the north and west. When scholars speak ofAthenian democracy, Athenian citizens, or the Athenian empire, they arereferring both to the urban center of Athens and to the rural districts ofAttica. Neither could exist without the other.

Athens as a city looked like many other cities in archaic and classicalGreece. It lay in a broad plain between two ranges of hills. The plain wasno more than 10 miles wide, and in the middle of the plain stood a smallcluster of hills. An outcropping of bedrock, the Acropolis, towered abovethe hills and the plain (figure 1). An acropolis, literally the “peak of thecity,” had the obvious advantage of being an easily defensible height anda natural fortress; acropolises were sites of palace complexes as far back asMycenaean times, before the thirteenth century. Other major urban cen-ters in Greece had this same topographical feature— cities such as Corinthto the south of Athens, and Thebes to the north. Athens and the Acrop-

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olis had the further natural advantage of being situated only 4 miles duenorth of the harbor of Phaleron, and only 5 miles from a complex ofthree natural harbors to the southwest, collectively called the Piraeus. Inthe fifth century, Athens and its harbors were physically linked by theconstruction of defensive walls. These walls would play an important rolein the course of the Peloponnesian War later in the fifth century.

The overall picture, then, might well resemble a walled city in medievalEu rope. Classical Athens was a well- fortified but small (by our standards)urban center with temples, markets, and the seat of the demo cratic insti-tutions alongside urban neighborhoods with their homes, businesses, andworkshops. Further suburban neighborhoods and businesses developedoutside the fortifications. Cemeteries and other sacred precincts were alsotraditionally found outside the city walls. Farms and villages in the outly-ing districts of Attica were all interconnected, but these villages main-tained direct contact primarily with Athens, since the city housed the cen-tral markets, the assemblies, and the law courts that formed the backboneof Athenian democracy. The most important public shrines of the gods

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Figure 1. Athens: the Acropolis with the Parthenon viewed from the south. Photoby author.

were also located in the center of Athens. This relationship between onecity and the surrounding countryside created a type of centripetal energythat moved toward Athens. Such an arrangement was unusual amongGreek cities, which more often or ga nized themselves along an axis withtwo or more public centers— one center for cultic activity and another forcommercial and po liti cal activity.

resources , colonies , and cultural contacts

For all the natural advantages enjoyed by Athens, life in the archaic andclassical city still entailed hard work. More often than not the majority ofresidents were familiar with poverty, privation, and the ever- present threatof hunger. Starting with Hesiod’s seventh- century poem Works and Days,Greek literature explored the themes of man’s never- ceasing labor and thesuffering that accompanies human existence. Alongside the toil Hesiodalso presented traditional tales of the Olympian gods and goddesses, andthe very different sort of existence that they led. Hesiod remained a fa-vorite poet of the Athenians throughout the fifth century; along withHomer, Hesiod was often quoted by Socrates.

But the Greeks were well aware that human life need not always be sotough. While the farmers throughout Attica maintained their rough, tradi-tional way of life for many generations, by the late sixth century the com-mercial center of Athens had developed a thriving import and exporteconomy, and a merchant class became acquainted with new prosperity.Athens’ chief export products were wine, the finest olive oil, and exquis-itely rendered ceramic ware, the famous black- figure and red- figure vasesthat were so prized during antiquity throughout the Mediterranean basin.Athens was also fully exploiting natural resources from its silver mines atLaurium, in the southern hills in the direction of Cape Sounion. Withthis silver the polis minted hard currency (a relatively recent innovation)and used that money in foreign trade.

Even with all the wealth generated by these various resources, famineremained a continual threat. Although the plains of Attica were fertileenough when the rains fell, some years brought drought, and there simplywas not enough consistently arable acreage to feed a burgeoning popula-tion. The Athenians were faced with constant pressure to import grain, andto export residents to colonies around the Mediterranean basin. The needto colonize and expand had been a factor in the larger Greek world since atleast the tenth century. At that time Greeks began to settle other lands

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around the Mediterranean, founding cities such as Corcyra (modernCorfu), Cyrene on the North Africa coast (today’s Libya), Syracuse inSicily, and Naples in Italy. Even a city as far west as Marseilles on the coastof France started out as a Greek colony. To the east, Greek settlementsspanned the entire coast of Asia Minor (now Turkey) around to Byzan-tium (Istanbul), famously situated along the trade route to the Black Sea.Athens was not prominent among the colonizers of the Archaic period;Corinth and the Euboean cities of Chalcis and Eretria took that honor.But colonization of a new sort would become an Athenian focus later inthe fifth century.

When centuries of colonization did not fully alleviate the pressure of thegrowing population of Attica, the Athenians started importing considerableamounts of grain. The importation of this staple had unforeseen economicand social repercussions. The continual need to import grain kept pressureon the silver mines at Laurium, which made possible the hard currency thatcould be used to purchase foreign cereals. Mining at Laurium in turn main-tained the demand for expendable slave labor— the mines at Laurium werenotorious for their cruel conditions. The institution of slavery itself dependedon vigorous foreign trade, and slave dealers exploited foreigners from over-seas markets. But the need to import so much grain had important implica-tions for Athenian foreign policy as well. Some grain came from Greekcolonies in Sicily and southern Italy, which were considerably less arid thanmainland Greece and far more fertile. But most imported grain came fromwhat the Greeks considered the breadbasket of their world: the expansiveand fertile plains north of the Black Sea in the area that today constitutesUkraine. Grain was shipped from Black Sea ports, through the straits ofthe Bosporus and the Hellespont, and then across the Aegean Sea. The con-stant need to import grain encouraged the growth of an energetic maritimeindustry, and it also meant that Athens felt a compelling interest to preserveopen trade routes.

Wherever the Greeks went as colonists and traders, they carried withthem their institutions and their distinct culture. This meant first of all theGreek language and the oral traditions that stretched back generations intothe heroic past of the Homeric warriors who had fought at Troy. Hand inhand with this mythology went the ancestral customs of religion and cultpractice, the regular and obligatory rituals through which Greeks main-tained contact with their ancestral gods. Finally, tightly interwoven withreligious customs were the po liti cal and legal structures. In fact, the sameword, nomos, designates religious custom as well as civil law. Although these

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two concepts are considered quite different in today’s Western democracies,throughout ancient Greece the customs, or nomoi, of civic governance andritual observance reinforced each other. This complete interdependence ofreligious and po liti cal institutions is perhaps for us today the most strangeand unexpected feature of demo cratic Athens. Accustomed as we are to a post- Enlightenment form of democracy with its separation of church andstate, we take for granted that the daily functions of government stand wellapart from the priestly functions of ritual and prayer. Yet for any Greekpolis, from the most traditional monarchy to the most radical democracy,such a separation was simply inconceivable. This interdependence was asstrong in the later centuries of Mediterranean antiquity as in the earliest,and many famous episodes in Greek history bear witness to it.

Polis is a Greek word most often translated as “city- state.” Polis is theancestor of such En glish words as “politics,” “po liti cal,” and “politician.”A polis was, quite simply, an in de pen dent and autonomous body of citi-zens, or politeis. Some poleis (plural) were ruled by hereditary kings ortyrants, some were oligarchies ruled by an ancestral aristocracy, and by theearly fifth century a very few were self- ruling democracies. In the fifthcentury there were literally hundreds of poleis in the Greek world. Most were small municipalities, indeed more like large market towns than nation- states. Athens was exceptional for its large size: 930 square miles,nearly the size of the state of Rhode Island (1,045 square miles). Athens’principal rival, Sparta, was likewise an unusually large polis in terms ofland area, though nowhere near as large as Athens in its combined citizen/resident population.

The po liti cal boundaries of Athens developed in slow stages from theeighth to the sixth centuries. Like much of Hellas after the fall of the Myce-naean palace culture in the twelfth century, Attica before the eighth cen-tury was a collection of insignificant and impoverished villages that werebeginning to come together and establish a distinct identity. The continualscarcity of resources over the generations created a polarized society thatwas composed of a small class of elite nobles and a much larger class of less well- to- do citizens who competed with the aristocracy for po liti cal power.The aristocracy drew its strength from lands in the outlying rural districtsin Attica while ruling from the chief urban center of Athens. Border dis-putes with neighboring poleis were common.

Establishing and maintaining conspicuous religious sites throughout At-tica became a way for Athenians to mark the frontiers of the polis. Ruralvillages often contained sanctuaries— land, altars, temples, and sometimes

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entire building complexes set aside for the traditional worship of the gods.Long before Athenian power in the Mediterranean reached its peak in thefifth century, Athens took control of sanctuaries near other poleis in therural countryside of Attica. Examples of significant border sanctuaries inAttica include the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron on the eastern coast,the sanctuaries of Athena and Poseidon at Cape Sounion on the southerntip of the Attica peninsula, the sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis on thewestern border with Megara, and the much- contested sanctuary of Am-phiaraus on the northern border between Attica and Boeotia. Chapter 4will examine one of these sites, the sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis, infuller detail, and chapter 6 will describe the complex interaction of reli-gion and politics surrounding a religious tradition that was associated witha “foreign” god, Dionysus, who reportedly entered Athens from the bor-derlands to the north and east.

In earlier times these sites on the frontiers of Attica had housed localcults that were po liti cally in de pen dent of Athens; but as Athenian terri-tory grew and its borders became better defined, both po liti cal and reli-gious power became centralized in Athens. While rites continued to be cel-ebrated at border sanctuaries as they had always been, the official homesof these cults were transferred to new civic sanctuaries constructed in thecivic center of Athens. One conspicuous example is the city’s Eleusinion,an urban sanctuary sacred to the goddess Demeter, whose main cult sitewas located on the western border of Attica in the town of Eleusis. The re-or ga ni za tion of these border sanctuaries during the Archaic period enabledpo liti cal and religious authority to radiate out from the center to the mar-gins of the polis. The polis’s po liti cal boundaries were sharpened and de-fined by Athens’ official religious and po liti cal connections to ancient ruralcults.

the reforms of solon and their

po liti cal aftermath

Although the po liti cal boundaries of Athens probably had stabilized byaround 700, Athenian democracy did not emerge whole and fully formed;Athenian democracy was not the inevitable outcome of what scholars callthe synoecism of Attica, or the union of its separate communities to forma single, larger sovereign community. The classical polis of fifth- centuryAthens, with all its po liti cal and religious institutions for which we nowhave so much physical and literary evidence, was the result of centuries of

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slow change punctuated by a few moments of major innovation. In someways the stress of these slow changes left indelible marks that even themost radical expressions of democracy could not erase. The most visible ofthese marks points to the gap between the various economic classes ofAthenians. The distinctions between the elite aristocrats and the commonpeople were preserved in the rituals, offices, and hierarchies of the polis.

For the generations leading up to the Classical period, the main distinc-tions recognized among the male inhabitants of Attica highlighted thelinks between civic, military, and economic status. A typical citizen in thepolis of archaic Athens was an adult freeborn male who owned land in At-tica and was not a debt bondsman working on someone else’s land. Someof these citizens were quite successful, while others might live more pre-cariously, subject to changeable weather and the unpredictable success ofcrops, but they at least maintained enough wealth to own the weapons andarmor of a warrior. Their limited resources enabled them to serve as ho-plites, or armed infantrymen. A small number of poor citizens owned noland at all and could not afford even the most basic armor; these men,called thetes, worked purely as hired laborers and their civic roles in thepolis were the most restricted. There were also citizens with considerablymore wealth. A small number of elite families owned enough land to raise horses, and these nobles served in the citizen army as “horse men,” hippeis,or knights. This three- tiered citizen body made up the foundation of mostpoleis in archaic Greece, not just Athens.

Where Athens began to diverge from the other Greek poleis in the Ar-chaic period was in its slow development of governing procedures thatgradually gave po liti cal power, kratos, to the common citizens, called thedemos, in En glish “the people.” Combining these two words producesdemokratia, hence our word “democracy”— the “power of the people.” Thefirst round of significant pre- democratic changes came during the rule ofSolon early in the sixth century. Solon was a traditional aristocrat, but dur-ing his year of elected rule as archon or chief executive magistrate (tradi-tionally dated to 594/3) he initiated the passage of a series of laws that hada profound and lasting impact on Athenian society. While many details ofthe changes remain lost to us today, we know their broad outlines: theSolonian laws encompassed fundamental changes to the life of all inhabi-tants of Attica, changes that affected areas ranging from religious rites tohom i cide laws to a new definition of citizen status. Recognizing the corro-sive effects that debt had wrought on the common citizens— particularlysince debt was so easily incurred by farmers trying to cultivate crops in the

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unpredictable climate of Attica— Solon banned debt slavery and freed anyexisting debt slaves. Solon then banned all agricultural exports, with thenotable exception of olive oil, thereby encouraging better use of the avail-able arable land.

Religious reforms were central to the Solonian reform program. Solonpushed through sumptuary legislation that limited the extravagance of fu-nerals, which had become elaborate public events designed to display powerand were potentially disruptive, especially when a member of the aristoc-racy was buried and the streets were full of grieving crowds and wailingwomen. Solon then revised and published a new, standardized civic calen-dar of religious festivals for the residents of Attica, and he redefined thedistribution of ritual privileges among the economic classes. Again, the in-clusion of this sort of religious reform runs counter to our notion of therole of government in public life, and we are reminded that nomos in Athensencompassed both of the modern categories “church” and “state.” Publiclife in the Greek polis demanded citizen participation in ritual, and eligibil-ity for religious offices was the first step to power and po liti cal authority inthe polis. Solon brought about great social and po liti cal change when hereformed laws relating to worship of the gods.

By far, the most influential changes Solon instituted involved the cre-ation of four citizen property classes that defined four distinct, graduateddegrees of po liti cal and ritual rights. The wealthiest aristocrats still had thesole access to the most powerful civic offices, but now the mass of non- aristocratic people, newly freed from the threat of slavery and debt bondage,had a limited voice in the Assembly, the ekklesia. Balanced against this As-sembly was the boule, the Council of 400 citizens (perhaps from the upperclasses) who deliberated the laws. He may have given limited citizen priv-ileges to craftsmen and hired laborers, some of whom were foreign born.Though these craftsmen owned no land at all, they worked in growingnumbers in the urban center of Athens. This evidence suggests that Solon’sreforms tied po liti cal privileges to economic class rather than to birth.While the richer citizens continued to have more po liti cal opportunities,the lower classes for the first time had some voice in how the city was to begoverned.

Solon was also responsible for innovations in the judicial system: he in-stituted a new appeal pro cess, and he invented what in Athenian parlancewas called a “public” action to supplement the more customary “private”forms of legal recourse. This reform allowed any citizen, not just the in-jured party or his family, to prosecute certain kinds of injury. Moreover,

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Solon reviewed the oldest written Athenian laws, the law code of Draco,which had been published just a few de cades before his own archonship(perhaps in 621). Solon abolished much of the harsh Draconian code withits reliance on capital punishment, and retained only those laws that ad-dressed hom i cide. But one aspect of Draco’s tradition that Solon did keepwas the commitment to making the nomoi visible to all. Solon had his newlaws, including the laws regulating cult practices and the worship of thegods, inscribed on big wooden tablets and publicly mounted in the Agora,where citizens of all property classes could refer to them. The beginningof public accountability is evident in the publication of the Solonian re-forms. Even if basic literacy was not yet widespread among all classes ofAthenians, this action marked the beginnings of the notion that the lawremained the same regardless of who was in power and implied that theeducated nobles were now being held accountable by those who could notnecessarily read the laws as published.

Athenian tradition relates that Solon went into a self- imposed ten- yearexile once he had completed his full program of reforms— but only aftermaking the Athenians promise that they would not tinker with the reformsduring his absence. Solon declined any offers to stay in power; he insistedthat the Athenians live with the reforms and give them a chance to work.Solon’s reforms broke the monopoly on po liti cal power long held by thenoblest and wealthiest families, but at the same time his laws failed toplease any single group completely. His new po liti cal compromise betweenthe privileged aristocrats and the more humble working poor did not bridgethe structural gap that Athenian society was based upon, and no type ofpo liti cal reform could change the arid climate of Attica and the unpre-dictable environment that helped maintain the economic gaps. But Solon’sreforms did give a boost to those who had less wealth than the landedaristocracy.

Po liti cal tensions between the classes remained and even increased in theyears after Solon stepped down, eventually resulting in a period of aristo-cratic “tyranny” when the noble- born Pisistratus first seized power around560. Pisistratus’s initial bid to become sole ruler, or tyrannos, in Athens didnot go smoothly. Despite alliances with po liti cal factions and other noblefamilies, Pisistratus was forced out of Attica twice before he actually suc-ceeded in establishing a stable tyranny in 546. “Tyranny” in today’s senseof a harsh and oppressive despotic rule overstates the situation as it existedin archaic Greece. Tyranny at that time was a common form of extra- constitutional monarchical rule, based perhaps on po liti cal models found

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to the east in Lydia, located in modern- day Turkey. Indeed, the Greekword tyrannos is not native to the Greek language but is a loan word fromAsia Minor. In the ancient model of tyranny an aristocrat became tyrantwhen he seized power in a coup, or inherited power that had been soseized. In sixth- century Greek usage, tyrannos came to mean somethingclose to our word “king”— Oedipus was tyrannos in the city of Thebes inSophocles’ famous tragedy Oedipus the King, whose Greek title is OedipousTyrannos.

In sixth- century Athens, Pisistratus the tyrannos ruled mildly. He en-joyed the support of certain aristocratic families and gained pop u lar ap-proval through his sponsorship of major civic and religious festivals. Dur-ing his reign Athens became an important Greek city with grand publicsanctuaries and civic festivals for the goddesses Athena and Demeter. Pisis-tratus constructed new buildings and commissioned artwork for sanctuar-ies on the Acropolis, and he built an altar to the twelve gods in the Agora.Dramatic festivals for the god Dionysus probably became pop u lar duringthe rule of Pisistratus and his sons. Pisistratus used traditional cult practicesto consolidate his power and advance a sense of cohesion and civic identityamong the Athenians. An anecdote in Herodotus illustrates how Pisistra-tus’s sense of po liti cal theater eased his first return from exile: he found anunusually tall and beautiful woman, and dressed and armed her likeAthena. This image of the goddess rode into Athens on a chariot announc-ing that she was bringing Pisistratus back to rule. When a rumor of Athena’sappearance reached the rural villages of Attica, townspeople rushed toAthens to see the per for mance and welcome Pisistratus back (Herodotus1.60). The earliest theater produced in Athens in the sixth century likewiserelied on a dramatic conceit in which costumed actors impersonated thegods; Pisistratus simply played off this traditional cultural pattern, and letthe demos participate alongside him in the civic drama.

Pisistratus apparently intended to establish a hereditary aristocratic dy-nasty, and rule passed to his son Hippias at his death in 527. The case of Pi-sistratus and his sons shows us how demo cratic impulses in Athens devel-oped slowly and unevenly. The innovative reforms of Solon gave way to therenewed energies of the elites, led by the Pisistratid family for more thanfifty years. After the death of Pisistratus, public sanctuaries and civic festi-vals continued to play a crucial role in the history of Athens. When an up-rising against the Pisistratid tyranny did finally occur, it unfolded during apolis- wide annual festival honoring Athena. The celebration called thePanathenaea was famous for its elaborate and lengthy religious pro cession

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through the Agora and up the Acropolis; priests, civic magistrates, andarmed warriors accompanied the sacrificial animals to the altar of Athena.Hippias, like his father, used such civic festivals as a public stage to displayhis civic power. Visibly leading the worship of Athena, the divine guardianof Athens, provided Hippias with a good opportunity to connect with thedemos, display his largesse, and demonstrate his piety.

Behind the scenes, elite resentment was growing against Hippias and hisyounger brother Hipparchus, and a small conspiracy was hatched amongsome aristocratic families. A group of Athenian men attending the Pana-thenaea armed themselves as though they were part of the pro cession, butin fact their target was Hippias. The attempted coup was unsuccessful. Inthe confusion before the pro cession started, Hippias dodged the assassin’sknife, but the weapon found its mark in his brother Hipparchus (Herodotus5.55; Thucydides 6.54–59; cf. Thucydides 1.20). The public murder ofHipparchus in 514 provided Hippias with the impetus to live up to themodern meaning of the title tyrant and he instituted a far more repressiveregime. This new regime would be short- lived. Two conspirators, Harmod-ius and Aristogeiton, lost their lives at the Panathenaea that day, but thetwo “tyrant slayers,” as they later came to be known, would be honored bycoming generations as the liberators of Athens. Statues of the two were setup in the Agora, where the demos went about its daily business of honoringthe gods and governing the polis.

the career and demo cratic reforms of cleisthenes

Like the tyrants Hippias and Pisistratus, the demo cratic reformer Cleis-thenes came from an aristocratic family, indeed one of the most famousfamilies in archaic Greece. His father’s family had a long tradition of po- liti cal ser vice to Athens, and had funded public building projects in Del-phi. His maternal grandfather, also named Cleisthenes, had been tyrannosin the nearby polis of Sicyon in the Peloponnese, and members of his fam-ily had married into the ruling family of Pisistratus. In Athens it seemsthat the aristocratic Cleisthenes distinguished himself as leader in a differ-ent way. He gave real po liti cal power to the ordinary citizens, the demos,while creating a po liti cal advantage for his own family. Cleisthenes wentabout preparing for po liti cal reforms in a particularly militaristic fashion.As an aristocrat with close family and po liti cal ties to poleis beyond Athens,Cleisthenes used his influence to enlist the aid of Cleomenes, king ofSparta. The Spartans were known to resist tyrants in their own polis and to

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dislike them in neighboring poleis. Cleomenes marched to Athens with asmall contingent of Spartan infantry and overthrew the tyranny of Hip-pias. Following the coup, Cleisthenes struggled with another Athenianleader for power, and he came out on top.

While Solon had paved the way for a fairer distribution of wealth sev-eral generations earlier, it is Cleisthenes who is perhaps best credited withinstituting the reforms that mark the beginning of a true, recognizableAthenian democracy. Like Solon before him, Cleisthenes realized thatdemo cratic power was closely tied to the rural villages of Attica, even if thedemo cratic institutions— the assembly places, council houses, and law courts— were housed in the urban center of Athens. Keeping in mind theAthenians’ ties to the traditional rural way of life, Cleisthenes gave powerto the ordinary citizens in Attica by distributing power throughout the vil-lages or demes of the polis. More importantly, he redefined the very notionof what constituted a deme. Originally “deme” simply was the word forany of the towns, villages, and rural districts in the countryside of Attica.But after Cleisthenes a deme became the smallest po liti cal unit in the polis.The deme became the building block for clustering citizens into manage-able units that could function easily in a preindustrial society that lackedthe Internet, telephones, or newspapers. Demes were grouped to form twolarger po liti cal units— namely, the thirty sections (trittyes) and the ten newtribes (phylai) into which the trittyes were then folded.

Traditionally, every male citizen born and living in Attica was a memberof a phratria, an ancient word that designated social groups that followedlines of male descent and had control over who was and was not recog-nized as a legitimate member of the Athenian citizen body. “Phratry” iscognate to the En glish word “brother” (compare the words “phratry” and“brother” to the Latin frater and German Bruder), and as hereditary broth-erhoods the phratries had worked for generations to maintain blood tiesand po liti cal power among the aristocrats. Phratry members worshippedthe gods together at state- sponsored festivals, and they dined together oncertain civic and religious holidays. Active phratry membership was essen-tial for enjoying po liti cal privileges in the archaic polis.

Cleisthenes’ reforms kept the institution of the phratries, and then clev-erly supplemented them by transforming the deme into the smallest con-stitutional unit that shared with them some of the same po liti cal, social,and religious functions. Rather than designating a mere rural or suburbanvillage as it had always done, the deme became the foundation supportingthe whole demo cratic apparatus. Cleisthenes’ reforms officially recognized

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139 demes, and deme membership became a component necessary for Athe-nian citizenship, in addition to traditional phratry membership. Member-ship in one of the demes, like that in a phratry, was inherited through thepaternal line. But the new Cleisthenic deme no longer simply designated aphysical place. The deme name was not necessarily an indication of thevillage where a citizen resided; it suggested which village his ancestorscame from. After Cleisthenes, the deme was a po liti cal unit, and Athenianmale citizens came to be identified by their deme name in addition to theirfather’s name— for example, Socrates’ full Athenian name was “Socrates,son of Sophroniscus, from the deme of Alopece.”

One strength in Cleisthenes’ plan was that demes and phratries rein-forced each other. They remained separate social groups, but they sharedimportant social, ritual, and po liti cal functions. Since official written recordkeeping did not yet exist, citizens relied on each other and on their com-munal groups to determine citizenship in the polis. The polis sponsored life- cycle rituals that celebrated the birth, po liti cal maturation, and marriage ofphratry and deme members. Deme and phratry members worshipped thegods together on a regular and predictable schedule of civic festivals. Mem-bership in a phratry and deme thus meant that peers in a citizen’s commu-nities witnessed him taking part in civic festivals and public feasts. In thisway demes and phratries shared a common purpose: both were social andpo liti cal groups that defined membership through active participation incivic rituals that also fulfilled a religious function.

As a consequence of the new civic and religious roles of the deme envi-sioned by Cleisthenes, every citizen had multiple and overlapping peergroups that both established and continually validated his civic status. Thecomplex and interdependent bonds of civic identity in Athens were revealedeven more starkly in the combinations of demes to form the larger socialnetworks of citizens, namely the thirty sections and the ten tribes. Cleis-thenes grouped each village (deme) with neighboring villages to constitute asection, or a trittys; he defined thirty sections in all, roughly equal in popula-tion. Three sections were then grouped to constitute one of the ten tribes(the word for section, trittys, literally means “a third”). The ten tribes were inpart a holdover from more ancient times, but Cleisthenes also reworked thearchaic notion of “tribe.” Before him there had been four tribes, the so- called Ionian tribes that had performed certain ritual functions, and he leftthem intact for some cultic purposes; he handed over other religious ritesand nearly all the po liti cal functions to ten newly created tribes, each namedafter a different semi- mythical hero, such as Cecrops or Aegeus.

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The great innovation in Cleisthenes’ plan was in the composition ofeach of the ten tribes. The politics of Attica had been growing increasinglycomplicated because of local tensions that were arising between three geo -graph i cally identifiable interest groups: the people of the coastal region,the inland agrarian residents, and the growing number of urban dwellersin and around Athens. To combat the potentially crippling effects of frac-tures along geo graph i cal lines, each of the ten tribes was composed ofthree sections, drawn equally from each of the three regions of Attica. Inthis way the ten Cleisthenic tribes had a geo graph i cally scattered member-ship, and regional special interests could not rule the day.

If the demes are viewed as the building blocks for the foundation ofAthenian democracy, then these ten new tribes are what provided a work-ing structure for the Cleisthenic system. Public offices of every imaginablesort were filled either by direct election or, more commonly, by a lotterysystem within each tribe. A combined pro cess of election and lottery wasused to select the important officers known as archons (archontes, “lead-ers”). The archonship was an ancient office that predated the Solonian andCleisthenic reforms. After Cleisthenes’ reforms, nine archons and a secre-tary were selected annually, one official from each tribe, for one- year termsas magistrates with religious and judicial duties. The pro cess of selectingthe archons in the new system involved first direct election of a pool ofcandidates, and then a lottery. This procedure apparently layered the olderaristocratic method beneath the newer Cleisthenic idea. Upon leavingoffice all ex- archons were eligible to serve on an ancient advisory boardcalled the Council of the Areopagus, which retained judicial powers forcertain legal proceedings including hom i cide and some religious cases.This council was one of the oldest institutions in Athens— it existed longbefore the reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes— and though its duties weregradually reduced over time, its core responsibilities illustrate a deep- seated assumption that the religious and po liti cal aspects of the stateoverlapped.

After the reforms of Cleisthenes, decision making and legislative powers were located in two demo cratic bodies. The body called the ekklesia, orAssembly, was open to all citizens, and it met about every ten days on ahillside in Athens called the Pnyx (figure 2). Athens probably had tens ofthousands of citizens, but judging from the size of the Pnyx a maximumof 6,000 to 8,000 attended the meetings. In some instances the Assemblyalso functioned as a large jury. The smaller Council of 500 called the boulereplaced the earlier Council of 400 established by Solon, and it met more

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often than the ekklesia to take care of legislative and judicial business.Each of the ten tribes supplied an annual quota of fifty citizens for theboule, chosen by lot from all but the lowest property classes. It was as-sumed that every citizen would sit on the boule at least once during his life-time, and ser vice on the boule was limited to two years total for each citi-zen. Each tribe’s committee of fifty was given the responsibility of presidingover the boule and ekklesia for a portion of each year called a prytany. Dur-ing that time the citizens were known as the fifty prytaneis, or presidents,and for one- tenth of the year (a little longer than a lunar month) they per-formed the executive functions and daily governance of the polis. The fiftypresidents were required to live in the city, and they dined at public expensein a public building called the Tholos. The office of the fifty prytaneis ro-tated by lot through the ten tribes established by Cleisthenes, and even thedaily chairmanship of the fifty presidents, the office of the epistates, wasselected by lottery each day.

The ten Cleisthenic tribes fulfilled other duties for the polis. Quotas ofhoplites for the infantry were determined on an equal basis for each of the

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Figure 2. Athens: the Acropolis viewed from the hill of the Pnyx. Photo by author.

ten tribes. Each tribe annually elected one of the ten generals, the strategoi,who made the military decisions for that year. The office of general wasone of the few in demo cratic Athens that was elected directly and not se-lected by lottery. Boards of magistrates were also selected equally from theten tribes. Each tribe even sent competing teams of athletes, singers, anddancers to represent it at polis- sponsored festivals.

The direct democracy of Cleisthenic Athens described here is more rad-ical than the modified forms of repre sen ta tional democracy in place today.Athenian demo cratic institutions as they existed after Cleisthenes and intothe age of Pericles in the fifth century ensured that every citizen could reg-ularly participate in communal decision making. The only impediments toparticipation were practical: a combination of time, distance from the city,and money. If a citizen could afford to take a day off from work, then hecould go to Athens and exercise his po liti cal privileges by serving on a jury,attending the Assembly, or participating in a civic religious rite.

According to one tradition Cleisthenes also implemented the institutionof ostracism (another theory dates it a few de cades later). Every year thedemos as a body was given the opportunity to send away one citizen deemedto be potentially too powerful or dangerous for the good of the polis. Firstthe Athenians determined whether they wished to hold an ostracism vote;if an ostracism was held, citizens met in the Agora two months later andvoted by scratching the name of a candidate onto an ostrakon, or brokenpiece of pottery— the ancient equivalent of a piece of scrap paper. Whoeverreceived a plurality of the votes was banished from the polis for a period often years. In this way the democracy placed a check on the po liti cal influ-ence of powerful leaders. Before the institution of ostracism, Athenianshad relied on the wisdom of their leaders to limit their own po liti cal powerby voluntarily going into exile, as Solon had done at the end of his periodof rule. Even after ostracism became official, few men actually receivedenough votes to be ostracized, but it did occasionally happen. BecauseCleisthenes abruptly falls out of the historical record following the year ofhis reforms, some scholars have proposed that Cleisthenes himself was im-mediately ostracized upon leaving office; others suggest that he left Athenson his own, in the tradition of Solon.

The demo cratic reforms of Cleisthenes instituted in the last de cade of thesixth century were put into place against a backdrop of broader changes that were occurring all throughout the Greek- speaking poleis of the easternMediterranean. Greek cities continued to experience economic growth astrade expanded, and this growth led to the increasing importance of port

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cities that took full advantage of their excellent natural harbors. Athens isonly one of the cities that followed this pattern; others included Corinth,which lay at the strategic isthmus between mainland Greece and the Pelo-ponnese, and Miletus in Asia Minor. The mounting influence of port citiesalso renewed tensions between residents of urban centers and rural areas— between those men whose wealth depended on the aristocratic connectionsto land and those who could build wealth despite being landless. Oftenthese tensions were played out in the development of religious practiceswithin cities. While the response to these changes took a demo cratic form inAthens, democracy was not the only possible outcome. Indeed, Athens wasconsidered unusual by its peers, and the governments of most other poleis ei-ther continued with the traditional forms of kingship and aristocratic rule orexperienced tyranny, the extra- constitutional form of monarchy.

The polis that Cleisthenes left to the Athenians was far different fromthe other Greek city- states in the year 500. In Athens even men of modestmeans were free to speak out and disagree with the wealthy and powerful.The demos took an active role in helping to make decisions that would bein the interest of everyone, not just of the wealthy aristocrats. Commoncitizens ruled their peers, and in turn were ruled by them. Ancestral tribalforms of community and worship continued as always and were even aug-mented and elaborated on. The brilliance of Cleisthenes was that he usedthe traditional po liti cal and cultic communities and religious customs toreinforce new institutions that gave more power to the demos. His reformscreated an ever greater degree of accountability among all citizens. Politicsand civic religious practices both played an important role in the systemsof accountability.

Cleisthenes himself had perhaps a curious familiarity with a brand ofcivic accountability that looked to both the man and to the communityfrom which the man came. He was a member of an old and well- establishednoble clan called the Alcmaeonidae, or the heirs of Alcmaeon. According toAthenian oral tradition, the Alcmaeonidae family had long been tainted bya curse. In the days of Cleisthenes’ great- grandfather Megacles in the mid- seventh century, an Athenian aristocrat named Cylon, flush with a recentvictory at the Olympian games, gathered a group of friends and allies and at-tempted a coup d’état. According to the historian Herodotus, Cylon hadmarried into the powerful ruling family in the neighboring polis of Megara,where the aristocrat Theagenes was then tyrannos. This was well before therises of Pisistratus, and Cylon had his eye on establishing the first tyranny inAthens. With his supporters Cylon seized the Acropolis. At this time Mega-

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cles was probably serving as archon, and under his leadership the Atheniansswiftly put an end to Cylon’s coup. When a group of Cylon’s allies tookrefuge at an altar on top of the Acropolis, Megacles and his supporters prom-ised to let them go if they would hand over their weapons. Cylon’s men did so— but Megacles and his followers did not live up to their part of the agree-ment, and in their outrage and fury they murdered some followers of Cylon.Cylon, the man who wanted to be the first tyrant in Athens, managed toescape the carnage.

Violating the sanctity of an altar of the gods was deadly serious busi-ness. Murder was a capital crime, but spilling human blood on groundholy to the deathless gods was doubly intolerable and could taint a familyand a whole city for generations to come. For this crime Megacles and hisentire family were found guilty of impiety and expelled from Attica. Butit was not only Megacles and his sons who were forced into exile. TheAthenians were so offended by Megacles’ impious actions against the polisand its religious traditions that at a later time they expelled even the bonesof Megacles’ ancestors, and cursed all of Megacles’ descendants. WhenMegacles’ son Alcmaeon and his sons (the Alcmaeonidae) later returnedto Attica and to public life, they too were haunted by the curse and theloss of their ancestral ties to the land, symbolized in the exiled bones ofthe ancestors (Herodotus 5.71–73; Thucydides 1.126; Aristotle AthenianConstitution 1).

Alcmaeon’s son Megacles felt the effects of the curse when trying tomarry off one of his daughters. The tyrant Pisistratus agreed to marry her,but because of the curse on the family he reportedly would not run therisk of having children by her, and they apparently never had intercourse.When Megacles learned of this he became enraged. It was left to his sonCleisthenes to finally escape the taint of the “curse of the Alcmaeonidae.”As a grandson of Alcmaeon and one of the family of the Alcmaeonidae,Cleisthenes also lacked the ancestral ties to Attica common among Athe-nian citizens. Cleisthenes’ early career shows him serving as one of the ar-chons under the tyrant Hippias, perhaps in an effort to fit in and cooper-ate with Athenian aristocrats who supported the tyranny, but later he wentinto exile and encouraged the Spartans to overthrow the tyranny of Hip-pias. When the Spartan general Cleomenes forced Hippias from power, hefeared the rise of another tyrannos, namely Cleisthenes. So the Spartansagain reminded the Athenians of the curse that dogged the Alcmaeonidae.

But here Cleisthenes outsmarted the Spartans: he counteracted the curseon his family’s ancestors by symbolically aligning himself with the Athenian

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demos, and against tyrants and aristocratic governments that would use anymeans available to restrict the opportunities and power of the common citi-zens. As a result, the Alcmaeonidae in generations to come were known inAthens as the “tyrant haters.” According to Athenian oral and later writtentradition, democracy emerged in Athens when the heir of an accursed aris-tocrat who had lost the security of his ties to his homeland established newties to the polis by empowering the demos and reenergizing the po liti cal andreligious life of the communities of Attica.

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